My vacation was hard-fought, and well-deserved after the sprint leading up to the change in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in October 2005.  I took a sip of my morning coffee and pondered whether I’d have lunch in the hotel or at a little taco place my wife and I had discovered the day before.

My laptop chirped at me, and I snapped on my headset.  It was time for a consultation appointment.  Virtual bankruptcy lawyer springs to action, leaving the coffee behind!

There was a time when the notion of a virtual law office was unheard of. A law firm operating without books, without desks, and without a physical location was unprofessional and extremely unorthodox.

No longer is that the case. Companies such as VLOTech and DirectLaw will help you get your virtual on. Free and low-cost applications help shuttle you to the cloud, where a world of wonder awaits you. Work from the beach, across the world, or just from your home with the dog by your side.

Lovely, no?

But here’s the problem – and it’s a real one.  The VLO model is largely an online document and communication repository for lawyers.  But a VLO does not help you become a virtual bankruptcy lawyer, or to transform your law office into a virtual one.

My firm has a physical location, but I’m not enamored of going there.  I’ve got a totally different mindset.  The mindset of a virtual bankruptcy lawyer, not one of a land-based attorney.

Take, for example, the story I told you at the beginning of this piece.  You may be amazed, entranced or just shocked that I could work from the beach in Acapulco.  But when you break it down, it’s not amazing whatsoever.

The Virtual Lawyer’s Tools Are Not Amazing

I don’t use any of the VLO platforms mentioned above; they’re excellent, but not what’s in my bag.  I relied, and continue to rely, upon a few basic sets of tools:

Phone:  Skype, a computer-based application, allows me to make and receive phone calls to a regular U.S.-based telephone number using only a computer with Internet access.  Costs me under $100 per year for a local number.  But if I didn’t want to go that route, I could simply use my cell phone with global roaming on it.

Internet-Based Faxing:  People use faxes, much to my chagrin.  I use MaxEMail, but there are a number of excellent providers out there.  Here’s how it works: someone puts a piece of paper into their fax machine, dials a local (or toll-free) number, and faxes it to you.  Instead of the page coming through a fax machine, it shows up in your email box as a PDF.  Once again, it costs me under $100 per year to keep this going.

Case Management:  I currently use RocketMatter, but have used Basecamp in the past.  It gives me the freedom to access client information on the go, and it’s reliable so long as I’ve got an Internet connection.  Basecamp allows me to give clients access to their documents, RocketMatter does not.  But there’s a solution.

Client File Access:  I use Dropbox, which allows me to synchronize files among computers and backs up to the cloud.  Using Dropbox you can share a specific folder with any other Dropbox user; all they need is an account, which they can get for no cost.  Tell your client to get a free Dropbox account, and then share their file with them.  When the matter is closed, revoke the sharing privileges.

My File Access:  Once again, I use Dropbox.  There are other solutions out there, but I like Dropbox because it’s got tons of features and is accessible from my Android device (they’ve got an iPhone and iPad app as well).  To get files from paper into my computer I either scan them using my ScanSnap scanner or, ideally, have clients fax them to me (remember, those faxes come through as email attachments in PDF format).

Staff Communications:  We use Google Talk to communicate.  Nuff said.

Calendaring and Appointment Setting:  We use Google Calendar for our calendars in the office, and a web application called AppointmentQuest to allow people to set up appointments to speak with us.  Appointment Quest is not the only system out there, but it does allow us to block off times when we’re not available and move stuff around.

Email:  Google Apps.  Free, web-based, accessible using our phones, and lots of storage.

The Virtual Lawyer’s Mindset Makes the Difference

Nothing outlined above is earth-shattering, nor is it custom-made.  It does, however, reflect the reality that we can work anywhere, any time.  Our clients need not be technologically advanced, either; the only thing they need is a telephone – everything else is on our side.  So it makes no sense to me when a lawyer tells me that they don’t go virtual because their clients aren’t tech-savvy.  That’s an excuse, not a real reason.

If you want to be a virtual lawyer, all you need to do is take a step outside.  Then another.  And then another.  Repeat until you’re in a comfortable location, and then open your laptop.  Keep the cell phone charged, maintain connectivity to the Internet, and get down to business.  That’s pretty much all there is to it.

The chains aren’t real.  All you have to fight against are your own preconceived notions about where you work.

To be sure, there are things you’ll need to do in order to prepare for that walk outside.  But once you have the mindset, the solutions to the other minor problems will soon come into sharper focus.

Photo credit:  Giorgio Montersino (via Flickr).

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By this measure, if you work as effectively alone from a home office or from an WiFi hot spot then it should not matter to the client. This is true, to a point. The client will look at your credentials, seek to determine that you are a person of substance, not just a cellphone number or a post office box number that may disappear overnight. If you have a history, then use it. If you are creating your professional life, then think about how to provide these assurances. Is volunteering to the client that you have professional malpractice insurance advisable and comforting ? I have not seen references on web pages, but it is an idea for the sole practicioner to describe that you have coverage unless you think that this makes you a target.

As for the digital age and me, we go back to its beginnings. A 1984 D.C. bar magazine pictures me on the sidewalk in front of the United States Supreme Court with the first model of the Macintosh computer.

I demonstrated the benefit of the computer to my colleagues. One said, that it is not dignified for lawyers to be at a keyboard. Others were slow to adapt.

Attitudes change. Photocopiers entered law offices in the 1960’s. Eventually, this gave rise to the mountain of papers now routinely produced in discovery responses but not possible previously.

One-line correcting electronic typewriters came into my life in the 1970’s. This reduced the anxiety of dealing with a typographical error on a page or within a document, a considerable achievement that is difficult to grasp unless experienced in the minutes before the clock moves to the last minutes before heading to the court to file a pleading. Today, electronic filing with courts produces its own anxieties because some of the systems are clunky, others are not intuitive.

Eventually, email, the internet, and electronic libraries. A lawyer no longer needed a library nor even a secretary. A few years ago, my proudest home office boast was that I had a secretary whom I never met during a three year period and who lived about ten miles away, outsourcing within the United States. Now, I hear of secretarial work performed anywhere in the world.

Each lifetime experiences change. When I was a child in the late 1930’s and the 1940’s, I still heard stories about the impact of the introduction of the first automobiles in a community. Even in my memory, traveling by passenger airplane was not commonplace. Boarding an airplane was as easy as going into a movie theater. That ended in 1970 when Yasser Arafat and the PLO hijacked four airplanes, took them to the Jordanian desert and destroyed three of them. Airport security followed and has consistently expanded. Today we talk about full body, digitized scanning at airports. Not all change arises from positive experiences.

I am comfortable with many of the technologies applicable to the practice of law, including time keeping, billing, electronic legal research, smartphones, Skype, online banking, outlining programs, speech recognition, scheduling and calendaring, teleconferencing, team editing online, optical character recognition, deposition processing, and lawyers demonstrating a lack of civility in exchanges by email, to name a few.

Just now, I am working on developing my own web site. Why would a lawyer in his seventh decade of life want a web site ? I want to offer my experience in a particularized manner, to lawyers and clients to be their coach, conduct impartial inquiries, or to serve as a Delphic Oracle and Sage. I still like to walk into a courtroom like a barrister and try a case. I do not want to spend years in preparing motions and fighting discovery. Will the economics work, I don’t know. Obviously, I think that it is worth the investment. The digitized world makes all this possible and more.

David Epstein is an attorney who is reinventing the legal profession.  If he can do it, why can’t you?

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Then, just prior to the NACBA conference in San Francisco, I had an opportunity to visit Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.  (I’ll admit to being somewhat of an Apple Fanboy, having never owned a Windows machine.)  In the company store there, I touched it.  I held the iPad in my hands and I knew I had to have it, next generation or not.  Two days later, I was waiting in line with my friend, Jay Fleischman, and at 5:15 PM I held the box containing my 64gig 3G iPad in my hands.

Due to prior commitments, I didn’t have much time to do more than activate it through iTunes that night and fell asleep with it on the table next to my bed.  The next morning, I  vowed to use it during my all-day presentation at NACBA.

A Step towards the Clouds

This is truly an evolutionary device and a step closer to true cloud computing.  I quickly found out that there was no direct method of moving my outline of the NACBA presentation to the device.  The iPad doesn’t have a visible file and folder hierarchy like most computers. Instead, it is like the iPhone/iPod Touch in that you interact with your data through the apps.  The files holding your data are not visible.

Well, I had this PDF with the presentation outline.  How was I going to get my outline on it so I could use it during the presentation?  Quickly thinking back to the way I had previously used my iPhone in Court, I emailed the document to myself.  Opening the email, I could read the one page PDF outline right there in the Mail App.  Problem solved.  With the email open in front of me, I used the iPad all day in the five sessions I had.

Subsequently, I discovered there are any number of ways to view documents on the iPad.  You can view PDFs in Mail, Apple’s Mobile Me app, or use a PDF specific app like GoodReader, iAnnotate, ReaddleDocs or any number of apps.  There are multiple ways of moving files from your computer to the iPad, but a majority of them use the cloud as an intermediary step.  You upload the file to servers hosted by the program providers and access those files from the cloud and either read them there or pull them down to the iPad.  Time will tell which approach works best for you and whether the app does what you want with your files once you access them.

Not Quite There

On the following Tuesday, I appeared in Bankruptcy Court in Connecticut and used the iPad to draft the terms of a stipulation in a contested matter.  The eyes of the Courtroom and the Bench were on me as I read the stipulation into the record from the iPad.  The document was created in the Notes app.  The note file transferred to my laptop through the Mail app so I could move the outline to my client’s folder on the server as a text document.  I didn’t need the iPad to do what I did, I could have just as easily done this all on the MacBook Pro I always bring to court.

I said this device is evolutionary.  The iPhone/iPod Touch was revolutionary.  The touch interface was truly a new way to interact with a computer.  Now after three years, we get it.  No need to point and click with a mouse, just point with your finger.  No need for a stylus.  Swipe through your apps and interact with your data or consume the content from the internet.

But the iPad is not totally a cloud device.  When you first fire it up, you need to activate it through your iTunes account by connecting it to your computer.  You sync your data and apps through iTunes through the USB port.  A lot of content is stored on the device.  I have over 5,000 photos, numerous record albums (yes, I’m from the vinyl generation) and a few movies on it using about 10 % of the storage in my 64gig unit.

We haven’t made the complete move to cloud computing yet.  There are those who complain that you can’t use a mouse with the iPad.  Some are trying to use a stylus to write on it.  And yet others have jail-broken the operating system to move files and apps on and off the device through a file folder system.  I’ve used PhoneView to access those folders without jail-breaking.

Once the cellular phone companies complete the move to 4G using compatible technologies and online storage becomes accessible from anywhere, the iPad will become the device to use as we transition from desktop to the cloud.  I get it.  Apple’s vision of the future has us using apps on our machines and the data will reside ‘out there’.  Truly time to Think Different.

Eugene Melchionne is a Connecticut bankruptcy lawyer, President of the Bankruptcy Law Network, and a long-time Mac user.

Photo courtesy of ancawonka.

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The paper files are almost all packed up for shipping to the digital storage company. The expensive phone system is for sale on Craigslist. The office furniture is also listed for sale. In fact, so is the office. No, I’m not going out of business. I’m moving. My new office address might as well be 123 Virtual Lane, Virtual Reality, Anywhere 00000. In 10 short days, my law practice will exist only in the virtual realm. I’m giddy about this change. Oh, wait, I’m scared to death…no, um, I’m giddy. Scared. Giddy. Ok, I’m both.

I’m giddy that I won’t be tied to the office almost every day because that’s where client files are, and that’s where the fax machine is, and that’s where the scanner is. But, I’m scared because I don’t know how clients will perceive the change. Is it possible for a “real” attorney to maintain and grow a virtual practice? Will clients 200 miles away retain me sight unseen?

I know this is the “Untethered Lawyer” blog, but come on…does this really work? I haven’t even announced the change to my existing clients. I’m hoping the “Out to Lunch” sign on the door tricks them and they’ll just go away and call and ask when I’m coming back from lunch.

I’m giddy because the virtual law office technology I’m licensing will automate much of the “administrivia” of running a solo law practice, and it has some really cool features. But, I’m scared because, let’s face it, I’m not exactly an “early adopter” tech user. Geez, I still carry around a paper calendar instead of using my blackberry. So, the thought of mastering the vlo technology brings some trepidation. And what about only using my cellphone? It does have a tendency to drop calls at the most inopportune time. How long will clients put up with that?

I’m giddy because it will now really be possible for me to be fully productive from my home in Atlanta, or with my mom in the Chicago area, or at my cousin’s house near Raleigh, North Carolina, in addition to the dreamy beach in Tahiti. But, I’m scared because what if I can’t find enough new clients or generate enough new business from existing clients to pay for all that pie-in-the-sky traveling? What if clients aren’t comfortable with my new avatar look on Virtual Lane? [And yes I realize I could have the same trouble attracting clients to my brick and mortar office if I don’t do the right business development, but somehow the issues seem magnified in the virtual realm].

So, I’m giddy and I’m scared—total insanity. But, in 10 days, I’m going out to lunch and I won’t be back. Please check on me in 90 days to see if I’m in a straight jacket or drafting contracts on the beach.

Traci D. Ellis is a veteran attorney with over 19 years of legal experience, both in private practice and as in house counsel for several Fortune 500 and privately held companies, including as Vice President & General Counsel. She now concentrates her practice in the areas of general business law, real estate law and wills and trusts. Visit Traci’s virtual law office at www.traciellislaw.com.

Photo courtesy of @chris.

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I thought initially of having a voice mail system that used the 4-Hour Workweek system of, “I’m not here, I’ll call you back at 2:00pm, leave a number and buzz off,” approach but quickly discarded it as unworkable for all but a few people in the office.

The old telephone system was unworkable, cumbersome and costly to maintain.  14 lines into the office just to be sure that callers never got a busy signal, proprietary handsets that could not be easily swapped out for replacements in the event of breakage, and lots of wires holding us to our desks.

If you’ve got a wired phone that lives on your hard-wired phone system, you’re hard-wired to your desk.  Definitely NOT location-independent.

I tried RingCentral, a virtual phone system that lets you create multiple mailboxes and forward them to a variety of places, but ultimately ditched it.  Though a great system and one that I think you should look into, RingCentral fell short in a variety of ways.  For example:

RingCentral is a VOIP (Internet-based) phone system, which means that if their central servers go down then so does your phone system; and

RingCentral’s mailboxes don’t offer a huge degree of customization in the way phones are answered and calls handled.

So in the end I went back to Grasshopper, a phone system I’ve been using for my own virtual law firm for a number of years.  The idea behind Grasshopper is simple – it takes what would otherwise be an expensive and full-featured phone system and turns it into a web-based service.

Here’s how it works:  your caller dials your number and is met with an auto-attendant greeting (“Welcome to blah blah blah, if you know your party’s extension dial it at any time.  For a dial-by-name directory dial 8, for the operator dial 0, etc.”)  You choose your extension and dial it.  The recipient’s extension dials and they pick up or send it to voice mail.

Simple, right?

There are a few things going on under the hood that make it spectacular:

The extension can ring to any phone – a cell phone, a desk phone, a Skype phone … any kind of phone you want.  This means I can program Grasshopper to ring my extension (which happens to be 704) in my office, on my home phone line, my cell phone … anywhere I choose.  So when someone calls me and connects with me, it doesn’t matter where I am physically.

You can choose when your extension rings to which phone.  I can set it up that my extension rings to my office phone Mondays from 9:00am to 1:00pm, my cell phone on Tuesdays, my home phone on Thursdays, and on and on.

You can shut down your phone entirely.  If my paralegal is out to lunch from 12:00pm-1:00pm each day, I can tell Grasshopper to stop sending calls to her during that time and send them instead directly to voice mail.  If I know I like to get “real work” done each day from 3:00pm-5:00pm then I can tell Grasshopper to send all calls to voice mail during that time.  My receptionist, who handles all new client calls, goes to lunch at 12:30pm-1:30pm each day; during that time, I tell Grasshopper to send her calls to a virtual assistant.  No more lost calls for us!

Grasshopper sends all voice mail messages to the recipient’s email account in mp3 format.  When I miss a call I don’t have to dial in and listen to messages – they come to me.  But more important than that, I can save those mp3 files to the client’s folder in our computer system.  Record-keeping becomes a breeze!

With Grasshopper, there’s never a busy signal.  Though the system is POTS (plain old telephone system) lines rather than Internet-based, when someone calls my firm’s main phone line they never get a busy signal – period.  So now instead of having to pay for 14 phone lines (at $50 per month, that adds up fast) for 6 people, I can just have 6 office phone lines going to their desks.  That saves us $400 per month right there.  Cha-ching!

Of course, we needed to keep our “main” phone line and set up call forwarding to the phone number provided by Grasshopper.  But our new business cards will have the Grasshopper-provided phone number on them, so eventually that old number will be a relic.  We will eventually decide whether to keep it or mothball it, but I suspect it will remain on the books for a number of years at least (it’s a good number).

Once I signed the firm up for Grasshopper we hired a voiceover artist on Elance for $125 to do a series of outgoing messages for us – the main one (“Thank you for calling Shaev & Fleischman …”), the transfer messages (what people hear when they’re on hold), and a few other main ones such as the one for directions and such.

Each month we’re looking at a significant cost savings over a “regular” phone system.  More important, though, is the fact that the entire firm is now location-independent … at least, as far as the phone system is concerned.

Disclosure:  The links to Grasshopper contained in this post are affiliate links.  If you click on those links and ultimately become a customer of Grasshopper I will get a commission.  That commission does not increase your cost for the Grasshopper service at all.  Quite frankly, it’s not a ton of money in my pocket but it does help defray the overhead costs of this site.  You can also find Grasshopper service online by doing a quick Google search.

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